The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) holds Israel fully responsible for pushing Gaza’s healthcare system into a devastating humanitarian catastrophe due to its deliberate and relentless targeting of hospitals and medical facilities in parallel with the escalating bombing of houses and residential neighborhoods on top of their residents. PCHR emphasizes that the few remaining hospitals in the Gaza Strip have become incapable of receiving this massive number of injuries amid the disruption of vital health services since the tightened siege was imposed on 02 March 2025. This is drastically undermining civilians’ right to healthcare and paving the way for a total collapse of humanitarian conditions at any moment.
The intensified direct and repeated attacks on hospitals and medical facilities in the Gaza Strip have forced one of the main hospitals in southern Gaza Strip, the Gaza European Hospital, to shut down and inflicted severe damage to the departments of Naser Medical Complex due to these direct attacks. Moreover, the buildings of the Indonesian and al-‘Awda Hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip sustained damage after its surrounding was targeted.
These attacks come amid the flow of thousands of injuries into these hospitals due to the increasing bombardment of houses and residential neighborhoods across the whole Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, these hospitals suffer under devastating conditions, including exhausted medical personnel and limited resources, rendering hospitals incapable of offering even the bare minimum services due to the ongoing siege and being under the Israeli deliberate bombardment and destruction over 18 months of the Israeli genocide against the people of the Gaza Strip. PCHR stresses that the ongoing targeting of medical facilities despite bearing clearly marked emblems and their locations in civilian areas reflects Israel’s absolute disregard for the international humanitarian law and constitutes a serious crime intended to deprive civilians of their right to healthcare.
According to PCHR’s monitoring, the recurrent targeting of the Gaza European Hospital over the past two days has forced it to go out of service. The bombardment has destroyed the hospital’s vital infrastructure, including sewage networks, internal departments and roads leading to it, obstructing patients and the insured’s access to the hospital. Such targeting deprives Gaza’s population of access to the specialized services exclusively provided by the hospital and unavailable elsewhere such as the neurosurgery, thoracic and cardiac surgery, vascular surgeries, and cardiac catheterization center. Moreover, the Gaza European Hospital is considered the only hospital providing follow-up for cancer patients after the destruction of the Turkish Palestinian Friendship Hospital; thus, cancer patients are being deprived of their necessary treatment protocols, putting their lives at risk of deadly complications.1
The healthcare system in the Gaza Strip is suffering from an unprecedented collapse as hospitals have gone out of service, and crucial departments in the few remaining hospitals suspended services due to the direct attacks and severe shortages of 43% in the essential medicines list and of 64% in medical consumables. As a result, patients in operating rooms, intensive care units, and emergency departments are suffering from the lack of important medical tools, outdated medical equipment and absence of vital diagnostic devices and anesthetics in addition to depletion of medical gas stocks, including oxygen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, ethylene, and nitrous oxide.2
This has impeded the provision of surgical services, even in emergencies. In the only eye hospital in Gaza, critical materials essential for retinal surgeries, diabetes-related complications, and internal bleeding have completely run out. There is also a critical shortage of important tools, such as fine surgical stitches and medical helium, drastically increasing the risk of total vision loss for many patients.3
The hospitals which are still providing limited medical services operate on generators. This means that these hospitals will shut down at any moment due to the severe shortage of fuel, thereby threatening an almost complete collapse of the healthcare services, particularly for patients with kidney failure, cancer, heart diseases, blood disorders and many more patients with chronic diseases. This catastrophe continues due to the Israeli authorities’ blocking entry of lifesaving medical supplies. Thus, urgent international intervention is required and cannot be delayed.
What the healthcare system in the Gaza Strip is enduring constitutes a blatant violation of Article 18 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which grants special protection to civilian hospitals, as well as Article 19, which prohibits attacks on such facilities as long as they are not used for military purposes.The ongoing destruction of the medical facilities alongside the total deprivation of medical supplies and humanitarian aid entry, embodies a form of slow genocide — which is criminalized in Article 2(c) of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
PCHR warns that Gaza’s healthcare system’s collapse is imminent in the Gaza Strip, and its devastating repercussions amount to a crime perpetrated in the world’s full view without any intervention to stop it or restore the bare minimum level of protection and healthcare for the Gaza Strip’s besieged population. Thus, PCHR calls upon the international community, particularly the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions — to uphold their legal and moral responsibilities and break their deafening silence towards the ongoing crimes against civilians and medical facilities in Gaza.
In light of the above, PCHR:
I wonder how people change so fast and don’t learn anything from their own past… These are the same victims of WWII, these are the same people who criticize Hitler, but now are committing the same crimes…
I wonder why these people don’t learn anything from their own past or read their history book or at least don’t want to behave like normal human-beings…!?
[…] as the last resort for thousands of patients. However, it has also gone out of service following recent Israeli attacks, leaving patients alone to face a slow death without medicines, equipment, or even hope for […]
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